treasure stolen gold
low the sun and busy bees
prepare for winter

We collected honey from our two backyard hives this fall and I've finally finished jarring it. The new hive, split from last year's hive, produced over 20 pounds of honey. This is more than our first hive produced last year, but the older hive was not to be outdone.

Queen Ann, in the second year of her reign, ran a very productive operation. Her daughters produced some of the lightest, most delightful honey I've ever had. The water content is so low that it pours out like a sheet of glass, folding at the bottom like you might expect from taffy.

From Ann's hive, we collected 100 pounds of honey, making the grand total 120 pounds between the two hives. This is the part we harvested. We leave enough behind for the bees to survive on during the long Minnesota winter, which amounts to another 80-100 pounds.

What's incredible is that all of this honey is produced from the flowers, trees, and vegetable gardens within a 2-3 mile radius of the hives. Two years ago, before I began this hobby, I wouldn't have thought this was possible in the city.

If you're interested in starting a backyard hive next spring, this is what you can look forward to. The real challenge of this urban agricultural experiment is to figure out what to do with the harvest.

Previously
Backyard beekeeping - splitting a hive

Equal parts hydroponic garden, aquarium, and interactive art, the Farm Fountain is an experiment in self-contained, indoor ecosystem design created by artists Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs. The idea is that you can raise edible fish and cycle their waste nutrients through a hanging garden which filters the water before returning it to the aquarium.

Their 4th generation Farm Fountain is currently on display at the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand until January 2009. From the Farm Fountain website:

This project is an experiment in local, sustainable agriculture and recycling. It utilizes 2-liter plastic soda bottles as planters and continuously recycles the water in the system to create a symbiotic relationship between edible plants, fish and humans. The work creates an indoor healthy environment that also provides oxygen and light to the humans working and moving through the space. The sound of water trickling through the plant containers creates a peaceful, relaxing waterfall. The Koi and Tilapia fish that are part of this project also provide a focus for relaxed viewing.

The plants we are currently growing include lettuces, cilantro, mint, basil, tomatoes, chives, parsley, mizuna, watercress and tatsoi. The Tilapia fish in this work are also edible and are a variety that have been farmed for thousands of years in the Nile delta.

A Basic Stamp program controls the pump mechanism, allowing the plants to be watered at regular intervals for a set period of time. Depending on available natural light, supplemental lighting can be provided by a combination of fluorescent and grow-spectrum LED lighting, switched from a standard light timer. Ken and Amy worked out a lot of the details during the construction of their 3rd Farm Fountain design (pictured above) and they've assembled a how-to instructional gallery which you can use to design your own Farm Fountain system.

There are a lot of external inputs required to keep the ecosystem healthy for a long period of time including fish food, PH and nitrate monitoring, and general gardening tasks. Once you've gotten accustomed to it, though, it's probably not much more work than maintaining a lawn, and a lawn can't give you tomatoes in the middle of winter.

Farm Fountain - a sculptural ecosystem you can eat

This wiki is dedicated to helping you find power while travelling at airports around the globe. We also have a Flickr group to share photos - http://www.flickr.com/groups/airpower/ please link back to this Wiki if you post a photo.

AirPower Home - [via] Link.

Pictured here, power @ the N gate in SETAC by Travelin' Librarian.

As featured later on Mythbusters (and mentioned on the Make blog awhile back), Wildwood Survival shows how to make a fire without tools, using just a can of coke, a chocolate bar, and some tinder. A follow-up post provides some alternative methods for "people who would like to make a solar reflector from the bottom of a can, but don't want to put in too much muscle."

For more food hacking ideas, check out Slashfood's roundup of top 25 food hacks or the Food Hacks Instructables group. For more on survival and hacking the great outdoors, outdoorhacks.com is worth a look.